Roses are definitely the empowering of some epic items.
As for thorns, well - I’m still crying after the loss of +1 summon limit for Mortar Trap from Conduit of Destructive Whispers.
I mean, I can get 27 seconds duration, and 2.3sec cooldown reduction without that Mortar “buff” they replaced it with (speaking of nominal values, not calculating in the global CDR). And it’s well enough to place 6 mortars comfortably.
Now, the bonus makes it 2.8 seconds cooldown reduction, with 31 duration, and it’s completely excess, considering the lack of that sixth additional mortar.
I might even venture as far as to say, that this new buff is useless. Both flat 0.5 CRD and 4 second dura is pretty much neglectible when handling more than 3 mortars. And because I try to balance those according to my blightlord shieldbreaker (5 mortars, 3 guardians of emp.), the sixth mortar was well to compensate for the lack of mobile that RR aura / player scaled phys/fire pets Oathkeeper gets. Now, I am left without that compensation, and my warpsmith (uh, I mean Pyromancer) feels like a sad, sorry sack of bones in comparison.
Oh well, at least I could place RR debuff on flashbang instead, so it’s not all that sour.
[grumble grumble] talk about justice… [grumble grumble]
It was’t overdue! It was loved, and will be dearly missed.
As I said, I miss the punch this sixth mortar offered, especially when compared with a monster with 5 mortars and 3 guardians, being pretty much the conduit for phys and fire damage themselves, offering also RR aura for those.
Let’s just say I don’t understand this change. But, such is life. Banhammer swings and strikes - why should I be the one lucky, whose favourite build has not ben squashed?
But the replacement mods on that conduit are complete garbage. Copy-pasted from Devils and Totems. Big FU to players who farmed and grinded for it. There’s no possible Mortar setup where this conduit is of any use.
Not really, only but in some quite exact case - +1 to demo is still solid, +2 to vindictive flame helps for my pyromancer to survive blood orb of chton and hungering void, and still have decent health regen.
It’s just, the bonus they replaced it with is useless. In its stead, I do pad things a bit using the RR debuf on flashbang, but that’s just about it - a lackluster in all but name.
It’s not that simple. Pyran lost +1 on the set (from 6 to 5; now it has just 4, poor fucker) but performance didn’t change. Actually, new records were beaten.
I don’t know about fire but lightning Mortars aren’t really much weaker offensively now with Halakor. Even stronger, I’d say. I almost beat my pre-patch record despite the Box nerf on the side. So all in all it was defense that was nerfed not offense. Losing a conduit is a big hit to defense.
I know, but if I have it hard-capped now, and - hypothetically - get +3 on that conduit (instead of that dura/CDR), I could reallocate 3 points to, say vindictive flame, for more hp regen and total speed, STILL having the Mortar Trap hard-capped.
Which - considering the Hungering Void proc - is never too much.
EDIT:
Plus, for builds less reliant on Mortars (a.k.a. that don’t hard-cap it just for the sake of it), that bonus would still boost them. So that would mean quite a bit of flexibility, as they could either dump the points in something else, leaving the mortar tagged/softcapped/whatever, or max it - they would just have these some points more to consider placement of.
Just my loose thoughts.
EDIT2:
Just now I got a bit of a worrisome thought regarding Hungering Void and Mortars placed before the proc triggering, but that’s a matter for Gameplay Discussion instead.
